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With the relative decline of Plancast and Upcoming, the Lanyrd startup has solidly stepped in to the breach, aggregating content around speakers, attendees, venues, books, video and anything to do with conferences. It’s also benefitted from the shutdown of the LinkedIn Events application. Now all it has to do is work out a business model. Well, today it does the big reveal on that, announcing the launch of Lanyrd Pro, a new paid-for premium product that lets companies track all their staff appearances at events and conferences.

Lanyrd Pro starts at $99 a month with a 10% discount if purchased annually. Pricing varies with the size of the team. Launch customers include Facebook, GitHub and Heroku, which spend plenty on sponsoring events and sending speakers.

Companies can spend a lot of time and money sending speakers to and sponsoring professional events but much of this activity is wasted if it’s not coordinated or promoted. So now Lanyrd has created special tools for companies to track all this activity and also promote it.

Managers can track their teams via an updating calendar of every event their speakers are attending or have attended in the past. Slides and videos from the talks are held in a central place, and private notes allow speakers or managers to provide feedback on events while private labels can be used to manage sponsorship deal-flow.

Simon Willison, CEO at Lanyrd, says the new feature has the potential to save companies thousands of dollars a year by stopping clashes and coordinating efforts better.

Delyn Simons, VP of Developer Platform at Mashery, says: “Keeping our community of 200,000 developers informed of the 60-plus hack events Mashery sponsors and attends each year is key to helping them and other developers innovate apps with the latest and greatest APIs.”

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Crunchbase

OverviewLanyrd is a directory of conferences, events and speakers. Visitors can sign in with Twitter to see events their friends are attending or speaking at, submit new events, add talks that they have given and build up their speaker profile.